Quite often, when I tell people I left a career in marketing to teach myself to program and develop software, they react with surprise or even amazement. As much as my ego wants it to be, it’s really not all that special, and it’s something I believe anyone can do, and many should.

Here’s how I learned to program, how it changed my perspective, and how you can do the same without falling into some of the same pitfalls I did.

The spark of interest

After spending nearly 5 years learning online marketing for the startup I worked at, I had become profoundly unhappy in my job. The only path forward I saw for myself was “marketing guru” (ugh), and I was constantly depressed.

Several people, including my dad, suggested that I pick up programming, and that I might enjoy that more than my present career. I perceived it as a serious affront to my abilities as a marketer and fumed at the advice.

But eventually, I decided to take a few minutes to talk with our lead developer and brought the idea up. His response surprised me and sidestepped all my concerns: “Everyone should know how to program. It’s a part of living in modern society. It’s like knowing how to change your oil or change a tire.”

We talked late into the night, and he wanted to show me how amazing programming was. He wrote a little program in Ruby that would create different animals, give them stats, let them fight, and see who would win.

I watched the strange symbols dance around the screen and was totally fascinated and thoroughly confused.

He handed me Learn to Program by Chris Pine and suggested that I start reading it. He said that I’d know whether I had any interest within two weeks, and my response would be either “this isn’t for me,” or “people get paid to do this?”

Learning to program

I started in on the next night, and asked the second question within hours. Captivated, I spent every night for the next few weeks working through the exercises in the book.

Each day I’d run into the developers’ room to talk about concepts, check my code, or get help on the tougher exercises (looking back, a recursive algorithm for parsing an array of arrays is a bit much for beginners).

Clearly, it was a stroke of luck that I worked with wonderful, knowledgeable people who were too happy to help me along the path.

From there, the books thing was working so well that I kept rolling with it. I picked up several advanced books that started to take me off track. Somewhere between Design Patterns in Ruby and Test-Driven Development, I started to feel like I’d gotten in over my head.

To make matters worse, I couldn’t separate what I was learning about Ruby from Rails. I didn’t understand where the language ended and the framework began. Did I have to read the whole “Programming Ruby” book? What about Rails books? What was MVC? I had to learn Javascript too? And CSS? And HTML?

I confided in my friend and admitted that I’d failed as a programmer. I couldn’t do it all at once, and there didn’t seem to be a way to break it up. He told me, “That’s enough, your problem is too many books. You need to write some code and go from there.”

My first projects

My friend was right: it was time to just start making things. I got tiny assignments from the dev team: small copy or functionality changes, or bite-size features that were low-risk if I failed.

The things I built were embarrassingly elementary, but it’s an amazing feeling to ship code, and I felt back on track.

I tried and failed at a few more side projects. I was wholly unprepared to build the square-foot-gardening app I wanted to make, having underestimated its difficulty.

It was about this time that the company started to go under and I was shown the door. I suddenly lost my support network, and it became more difficult to practice my coding skills.

Luckily, just a few months later, I discovered Ruby Mendicant University. Started by Gregory Brown, it’s a free online school for intermediate programmers with a strong focus on building stuff for real-life situations.

Going full-time

After completing the core Mendicant University course, my projects became slightly more ambitious: A video upload site that limits you to 1 minute (a terrible idea, if you’re considering it), then a lunch-voting app, ToDoGroove, and now Hashbadges, which is mostly under wraps for the time being.

Even with all that, I still had a mental block about becoming a full-time programmer. I was more comfortable hanging back a bit and helping manage programmers than trying to write code that would actually be used in the business.

Luckily, I had a friend call me out on this and tell me that it was do-or-die time. I either needed to start coding and stop making excuses, or be happy with a non-technical role. We spent the next week pair programming, and I realized that I really am capable of programming full-time.

That week, I moved my desk into the programmers’ area and decided to become a full-time developer. (Kudos to my employer for not firing me for that one.)

I’ve only been a full-time programmer for about 5 months, but it’s been the most fun and interesting few months of my career thus far.

I have no idea where the future is taking me, because I’m having so much fun with what I’m doing now. No matter what I decide to do next, the act of learning to program has taught me lessons that completely altered the course of my life.

I came across your article while I was looking for successful stories of people who learned programming from scratch.

I am currently working in a medical lab, doing various tests to identify disease agents in patients’ serum and arrived at the point where I want to do something else, use my reasoning capacity at 200% and create/innovate.

With so many programming languages, I don’t know which one to choose for starters. I am seeking for an advice: found a Java course in my town which starts in less than 2 weeks and I am wondering if it is a good 1st choice. I know a bit of C++ (highschool level), or used to…

Any advice would be appreciated.
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http://brandonhays.com/blog Brandon Hays

Java can be an intimidating language for non-programmers to read and look at due to its formal style, sort of like Elizabethan english is tough to crack. But if you already remember C++, Java should feel somewhat familiar.

Ruby and Python are generally easier to read and understand (and Python is the easier of the two to reason about, since there’s generally one way to do things).

It’s really a question of “Which one is likely to inspire you to make fun stuff that gets you excited?”

The problem with Java is not the language, it’s just that the ecosystem is so mature that it’s dominated by corporate interests rather than by hobbyists. So to me, that is a ding against it.

All I can say is stick close to open source, run run run from Microsoft tools. The most important thing is community, and open source tools foster community.

Who do you know that programs professionally? Are they passionate? Are they ok answering newbie questions? If so, pick that language and start making stuff in it and asking questions as you go.

If not, is there a programmer meetup near you? What’s the dominant language of the passionate people there?

I really like Ruby for this because there’s a large, passionate community, great intro materials, and lots of hobbyist *and* professional projects. But that’s still less important than who you know that can help you learn.

It is probably possible to learn to program in a total vacuum using only books and Google as your guides, but the most important thing you can do now from my perspective is do a little social engineering and start piecing together your own mentorship.

There’s just no substitute for personal, one-to-one interaction when you inevitably get stuck and the googles do nothing.

Thank you for the prompt reply. I am trying to find a programmer meetup as you suggested. So far, the people attending look intimidating, as they all gather to heavily code.

I’m currently dealing with the question “how does this language work?”, while they are trying to solve cute problems elegantly.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any programmer within walking/biking distance. So I decided to go for that Java course… Although I am familiar with C++, I haven’t done object oriented programming before.

Hopefully in a few months, I shall be able to share my experience with others. I appreciate that you have taken the time to write me. I wouldn’t have thought about a programming community, at least not at the beginning, but the more I think about it, the wiser it seems (to do so). So thank you again.

exploringme

This is already sufficient for me. Actually a good guide for a start. Thanks!Spectra